Meet Ed Avery (James Mason), both hero, villain and victim in Bigger Than Life (1956). He is an easygoing grade school teacher who lives an apparently tranquil life in a small town with his wife and son, looking out for hearth and home.

His seemingly docile nature and understanding ear have made him an appealing teacher and colleague, even if his attempts to arrange things neatly might occasionally irk one co-worker (Walter Matthau, in an early straight role as a gym teacher. He even plays one who eats yogurt, yet!). On a daily basis, Avery is faced with students such as the one who can’t even grasp one shred of information like the name of a Great Lake. “Just think of one, can’t you?” he pleads with one loutish dullard, who replies “Uh, Lake Huron?” After this piercing insight Avery (Mason) exultantly praises the overgrown twit as “a good boy”, adopting a genuinely affectionate tone a bit like one uses with a puppy who has made it onto the newspaper. Outwardly untroubled by his charges’ lack of curiosity, his priority is more attuned to making ends meet after being paid meagerly by his school district. Working surreptitiously as a taxi dispatcher, a job that he believes his wife might “think wasn’t good enough for him”, he rushes to the cab company, briefly waylaid while changing at his locker by a stabbing, recurrent pain that nearly doubles him over. His wife, played with a wonderfully querulous tension by Barbara Rush, is troubled by a nagging feeling that, instead of attending stultifying board meetings on a nearly daily basis, as he claims, he may be having an affair.

As the story unfolds, there are a few inklings of a bit of inner restlessness. Bigger Than Life (1956) offers us a subversive Hollywood critique of  bourgeois life in an American town. Unlike Rebel Without a Cause (1956), with its narrow, rather puerile view and utterly compelling  paean to adolescence by the same director, Nicholas Ray treats his adults as well as his child characters with much more compassion and ambivalence. Mason‘s character, who was a mildly restless pillar of the community prior to the onset of a mysterious movie illness, is introduced to us as a bit worried about money and his professional status, but relatively content in his marriage to housewife Rush.

Cracks in the facade start to show further when Mason arrives home from a very long day, and Ed finds his son (Christopher Olsen) transfixed by the television, and incapable of a conversation that might extend beyond his own sense of entitlement, (or is it his need for a relationship with his father?). The walls at home are covered with maps of the world and posters decorate the grey walls extolling the beauty of France and Bologna. After a prosaic night of bridge with friends whose conversation centered on children and vacuum cleaners, in a rare moment of candor he points out their essential mundane nature and that of their friends gently. “Let’s face it–you are, I am, let’s face it, we’re dull.” He asks his visibly uncomfortable wife, “Can you tell me one thing, that was said or done by anyone here tonight that was funny, startling, or imaginative?” As if the act of uttering such insightful words were blasphemy, Avery is knocked unconscious by that recurring pain onto the bedroom floor. Off to the hospital he goes, where Mason is, it turns out, the victim of periarteritis nodosa, an inflammation of the arteries that is usually fatal within a year.

This startling news is delivered to Mason by his family doctor, played by that familiar, concerned but generally clueless authority figure in many ’50s movies, Robert F. Simon, who is aided and abetted by the smug Roland Winters, another spurious example of a dubious patriarchal medico who appears here as a specialist. The pair offer “a miracle drug” called cortisone, which was then new on the market and might give the teacher a chance at life…if taken correctly. Sounds like the makings of your garden variety Lifetime Movie doesn’t it?

This being a “problem movie” that blends dramatic and even classical themes, life is “seen through a glass darkly” and the movie may be experienced on several levels by the viewer, including that of a “harrowingly realistic” medical drama. Bigger Than Life (1956), one of the most powerful, yet richly textured films of director Nicholas Ray‘s roller coaster career, was a film that bowled me over recently when I stumbled across once again after several years. Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, and They Live By Night seem to be much better known movies made by this director, (in part because they have received DVD transfers in Region 1 in recent years), but the questions that are asked about the meaning of middle class life in this film still resonate, despite some reviewers dismissal of this movie as a “lurid melodrama” or a “male weepie”. On the surface, this movie might appear to be a cautionary tale of how drug abuse can distort an individual’s judgment. Coming in the same decade as a couple of groundbreaking films on the subject of drugs, such as Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Nelson Algren’s  The Man With The Golden Arm (1957) and Fred Zinnemann’s take on Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain (1957), both of which followed this movie, Bigger Than Life (1956) had two things those other films did not have: Nicholas Ray‘s determination to critique the world on film, and James Mason‘s acting ability at a time when his career as a leading man seemed almost over.

Soon, Ed Avery (James Mason) returns home from the hospital after being told that he must continue taking the cortisone indefinitely. As he packs up his things, none of his team of doctors seems to notice that he is so exhilarated by his new-found pain-free existence that he’s practically walking on air.  His wife and son find his energy, self esteem and sense of missionary zeal in attacking life a bit overwhelming. On his first day home, he insists on buying his wife expensive and outlandish dresses, and uncharacteristically treats the staff in a condescendingly gruff manner. Winding up the spree by insisting on one more purchase, even his worried and perceptive son whispers to his mother “Isn’t Dad being a little silly?” This being the fifties, no one heeds this lad’s pertinent question. As played by Christopher Olsen, the son is, in his largely inarticulate, childish place, probably one of the few clear-eyed individuals in the family and the community, if only it would occur to the harried and rather smug adults around him to occasionally pause to consider things from his approximately 4’3″ viewpoint. As it is, the kid spends much of the film trying, with increasing desperation, to make Mom and Dad “happy”, (and, hopefully, appeasing them will also keep them off his back).

While taking the “Miracle Drug” that restores his health, Mason finds himself feeling even better after ingesting more and more of the prescription, even though his doctor warns him to follow the dosage directions exactly. As you probably can guess, he becomes addicted to the drug, which, in one sense allows him to see the world as if a veil had been removed from his eyes. Mason, in his new, self-appointed role as a truth-teller, revels in critiquing the shallow rituals of his burg, the complacency that rewards mediocrity over striving for excellence, and, unfortunately, what he sees as his mission to reform his wife’s shortcomings and his son’s slacker tendencies. As he descends into his addictive spiral, every step of the way, James Mason gives one of his best performances, using that wonderful, sarcastic lilt of his to describe the stupidity of those around him but also expressing palpable physical and psychic pain brilliantly.  As Ray reflected later,  the character’s drug addiction liberates him, and becomes “a habitual source of grandeur” for him. The film also used the character’s plight to criticize blind faith in science

A scene at a parent-teacher night at school unleashes his new found arrogance and aggression, as, disgusted by what he regards as the bovine parents’ appreciation of their little darlings’ crude art work, he launches into an unasked-for lecture on excellence,  pointing out that at best, their children are at the stage of evolutionary development of chimpanzees. He culminates his diatribe in the observation that “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets.” His growing megalomania, and a belief that his new raison d’être is to reform education on a massive scale grows out of his chemical psychosis, but in terms of the film it is also  his clarity of vision regarding the state of society. This is paired with episodes of deep depression, which Mason expresses in several arresting wordless closeups. As these mood swings become increasingly dominant and more violent, his family soon rues the day they were born, and even harbor unarticulated wishes that he might never have been given this “miracle drug”.  The mounting delusions lead to his berating of his non-intellectual wife (Rush), and he becomes  the bane of son’s existence (Olsen), who is browbeaten by his father into practicing football at length, (perhaps in an unsaid repudiation of his father’s disappointment in his minor glory on the field). In a particularly harrowing scene, the father corners his son in the den, and makes the boy calculate mathematical problems for hours. This scene, which can be seen here , should give you a taste of this movie’s power.  Shot from a very low angle with expressionistic shadows thrown on the wall by the malevolent father’s looming presence, it underlines the menacing atmosphere from the boy’s viewpoint.

The script, based on a real life case of a New Jersey teacher, reported in The New Yorker by Berton Roueché, is said to have been written by Ray, Mason, Gavin Lambert and Clifford Odets, though it is credited officially to Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum. Given the fluidity and occasional rich literacy of the language in this movie, as well as the on target and sometimes ham-fisted jabs at the middle-class mentality, it is easy to believe that Odets had a large hand in the writing. There are also several touches in the script, such as a realistic attitude toward money (and the lack of it), the blend of irritability and longing that can easily exist between a long married pair trying to keep their marriage’s equilibrium, the father’s projection of his own past disappointments on his son and the wife’s preoccupation with “how things appear” to others (illustrated in the clip found here ) that I found particularly well done in this movie. Of course, the well known problems of the gifted Nicholas Ray‘s own addiction issues may have given his direction of this film an added fillip as well. Interestingly, I found that in a 1980s interview with Richard Maibaum about this script, the director was said to have loathed the film, and, in particular, the character of the wife. (No wonder whenever Barbara Rush speaks in this movie she has a characteristic catch in her voice, as though she is swallowing her words rather than spit out the half-realized truth). Despite saddling Rush with the part of an unusually obtuse woman, (I would’ve been on the phone to the doc the first night he was home!) I thought the actress caught a certain poignant confusion in her character. She respects her husband, and the doctors, and is not accustomed to thinking that they might do anything that would harm her family and home. While she sometimes seems to acquiesce too much to the authority figures around her from our viewpoint, Rush indicates in her rigid body language and her slow burns, that, like her husband, her soul may not entirely satisfied by the thought of a new hot water heater either.

While James Mason found the scattershot working conditions on the set unsettling, director Nicholas Ray, a prodigiously talented and creative man who courted the muse of chaos all his life, is said to have changed the script on a daily basis, much to the chagrin of the star. While Ray would often claim that on his films “we were winging it all the way”, perhaps his behavior was a deliberate way to keep his cast and crew on their toes as well as a self-indulgence.

It might also be possible that James Mason imbued the role with his own increasing dissatisfaction with his career, a decaying personal life and his own largely unappreciated gifts as an actor, giving his bravura performance in this movie a controlled intensity as it built throughout the movie.

Mason, who has always been one of my favorite actors to watch and listen to, (the man could get more meanings, shadings and humor out the flattest line than 99% of other actors) came to America with the encouragement of his then wife, Pamela Ostrer Kellino Mason (seen with him below). The shift to America and Hollywood proved problematic. Often appearing as a suave, often evil character on screen, he was, according to several sources, a shy man who loved cats, reading, and painting in private life who was ill at ease in presenting himself to Hollywood as the flavor of the month. His style in the fifties was too urbane and not overtly macho for filmdom’s obsession with grandiosity in that decade. His move to the American cinema came after his stardom as a sinister but romantic hero in his native Britain began to feel stale and confining. Even after appearing in Carol Reed’s artistically hailed Odd Man Out (1947) there seemed little future in English movies. Money was also a factor, surely, but the actor clung to the hope that more satisfying roles working with masterful directors might come his way as well.  While his work in interesting artistic and commercial failures such as The Reckless Moment (1949),  Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), 5 Fingers (1952) , and A Star is Born (1954) now seem exceptional, though his services were in demand in more commercially successful films such as his portrayals of Rommel in The Desert Fox and The Desert Rats and Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Movies such as these won him popular acclaim–of a sort.

After filming Forever Darling, a movie in which he played an angel and one that he regarded as “the worst he ever appeared in”, (despite his appreciation of Lucille Ball’s talent), Mason had signed a short term contract with 20th Century Fox studios. He still hoped to find some better parts for himself in American movies by becoming his own producer as well. Hoping to make a movie out of Richard Hughes’ High Wind in Jamaica, (the story of children kidnapped by pirates, which would be filmed with Anthony Quinn as star in 1965),  and to remake Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre with himself as Rochester and Joanne Woodward as Jane, Mason‘s projects were refused by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Though I’m not sure why, Zanuck consented to back Bigger Than Life, perhaps because this was the same year when the Production Code was revised to permit on-screen references to drugs and prostitution. 

Filmed in DeLuxe Color and Cinemascope, a recently restored 35mm print of Bigger Than Life was shown earlier this month at the Film Forum in New York City, (perhaps presaging a release on DVD, I wonder?). The off-kilter point of view of this film is greatly enhanced by the excellent, often deliberately distorted cinematography of Joseph MacDonald in this movie, which was, according to appalled contemporaries at the studio, being photographed from “crazy angles” and bigger closeups than were thought wise with Cinemascope. As in Rebel Without a Cause, color–especially red–becomes almost another character here, as the nightmarish existence develops. This was despite the star’s reaction to DeLuxe Color, which Mason said “had a way of making all films look like very cheap colour advertisements from magazines.” Seen today, that curious brightness helps to emphasize the surface falsity of the lives that the characters are leading. As is often the case with 20th Century Fox films of the forties and fifties, the art direction, under the combined aegis of Jack Martin Smith & Lyle R. Wheeler, is remarkably detailed.

The architecture of the film, which culminates in a remarkable, nearly hallucinatory sequence centered around the staircase in the family home, comes as Mason‘s character spins out of control into a delusional state leading the addled Avery to believe that he should re-enact Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. When the frantic mother tries to reason with her husband by pointing out that Abraham spared Isaac at God’s behest, Mason bellows, in an extraordinary moment: “God was wrong!” Thanks to the portal to the unconscious opened by the miracle drug, the character’s intellectual arrogance, latent egotism and fanaticism and an overwhelming urge to destroy the bourgeois life he lives have all rushed out of him. Fortunately, all those workouts that Wally the Gym Teacher (Walter Matthau) has been extolling throughout the movie pay off for Mom and the Boy, even if it leads to the destruction of a goodly portion of the interior of the house in a fight that might have been choreographed for a John Wayne movie.  There is a coda to the film that tries to make it appear that a hospitalized Ed Avery–back safely in the hands of the AMA–may be back on the path to well-being and health–if he follows instructions this time. Yeah, right. While mother and son warmly embrace their addled lord and master in the denouement, I can’t help but wonder how long it will take for the pair of them to forget their ordeal. And I’m not sure that they ever looked at this central authority figure in their lives again without looking for that mad gleam in his eye. In one sense, all of the characters have lived through a story that might be readily categorized as belonging to that popular fifties genre, the monster movie–except the monster was someone they knew and loved.

The film, which Mason eventually regarded as too far ahead of its time, was a financial disaster. Nicholas Ray‘s direction and Mason‘s acting received praise from a few critics, including Francois Truffaut, who compared the story not to a psychological portrait, but a fable, with the moral solitude of Mason’s character, his flight from logic and his tentative return to understanding as someone who understands the limits of intellectual responses to life and yet acknowledges the need for logic and compromise.

This film, which is only commercially available on a Region 2 DVD and VHS, is broadcast on cable occasionally. I hope that someday soon it will appear in a showcase such as TCM as well as a Region 1 DVD too.

Upcoming James Mason Films on TCM

Upcoming Nicholas Ray Films on TCM

Sources:

Landy, Marcia, editor, Schatz, Thomas, author of “The Family Melodrama” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema, Blackwell Publishing, 2003
Sweeney, Kevin, James Mason: A Bio-bibliography, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999.
Truffaut, François, Mayhew, Leonard, The Films in My Life, Da Capo Press, 1994